At least some small aircraft have a rotating vane sensor which measures the direction of the airflow in relation to the aircraft, ie. the angle of attack. It may be used to trigger a stall warning if the angle exceeds safe operating limits. I don't know, however, how many larger airliners come with similar equipment - I've seen a picture of one on an A380, at least.
The trick for more sprites on C64 was to generate rasterline interrupts which change the sprite location while the electron gun of the display was still drawing it. This way you could re-use a sprite further down the screen in an area which had not yet been drawn. However, the new location had to be at least 21 (IIRC) rasterlines below the rastercount at which the interrupt occurred for the new sprite to be displayed. Also, you couldn't change the sprite data pointer until the old sprite was fully drawn because weird things would happen.
Also, it should be noted that realtime phong shading was already common in demos/intros running on 33 MHz 386 CPUs back in the 90s
You know, you really shouldn't believe Jmagic if he says an object has 7800 phong shaded polys...
As far as I know, all the software rendering demos and intros in the 90s claiming phong shading faked it either by envmapping with a prerendered texture of a specular highlight or doing gouraud with a non-linear palette. Both looked reasonably convincing, albeit with somewhat rough and/or distorted highlights.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
